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OPINION

Jack McElroy: Between Reds and Blues, it matters only who gets credit, not what gets done

Harry Truman said, 'It is amazing how much you can accomplish when it doesn't matter who gets the credit.' Ronald Reagan put it this way: 'There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit.'

Many others have said it, too. But who cares? The point is that authorship doesn't matter if you want to get something done.

The inverse, of course, is that nothing gets done if the only thing you care about is who gets the credit, or the blame.

That, unfortunately, is the philosophy that has guided Congress in recent years, as was so vividly displayed last week.

A recent CNN/ORC poll showed that 85 percent of Americans think that people who can't fly because they might be terrorists shouldn't be able to buy guns, either. Among Republicans, the number is even higher, with 90 percent saying folks on watch lists should be banned from buying firearms.

But in Congress, the purpose of legislation isn't to address the concerns of the American people. It's to stick it to the other guy.

As Sen. Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who led a filibuster to force Senate votes on gun control last week, said: 'Some of this is going to turn into an electoral operation. I'm going to be turning my attention to the November election. I'm going to take some of my energy and help make sure that people who cast the wrong vote don't come' back to the Senate.

Both parties wanted to appear responsive to the citizenry in the wake of Orlando, so both introduced bills in the Senate.

At the center of the debate were the watch lists developed after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the government created the Terrorist Screening Database. The database now contains the names of about a million people, a few thousand of whom are Americans. A subset of that is the no-fly list of people banned from getting on airplanes. It has the names of about 80,000 people, some 1,000 of whom are Americans. The 'TSA selectee list,' doesn't ban flying but triggers stricter searches. It has about 28,000 records, including those of some 1,700 Americans.

The Democrats' bill would have let the feds use 'reasonable belief' to stop a gun sale to someone on the lists. The Republicans' bill would have alerted agents if someone on the lists wanted to buy a gun, then a judge would have to find 'probable cause' to stop the sale.

Tennessee's Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker were among the Republicans rallying to the red banner.

'I strongly believe that terrorists, criminals, and those adjudicated mentally ill should not be able to obtain firearms,' said Corker, 'and that we must protect the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans.'

Alexander agreed with that. Heck, everyone agrees with that.

But in Congress, agreeing isn't what matters. Assigning credit and blame does. So again, no compromise could be found, and nothing got done.

More and more, I find myself thinking about the Crips and the Bloods as I watch our two parties caught in their endless cycle of retaliation. The waste is tragic as they seek to destroy each other, representin' for the colors — blue or red — that they donned at an early age based on the 'hood in which they grew up.

Read or Share this story: https://www.knoxnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/jack-mcelroy/2016/06/25/jack-mcelroy-between-reds-and-blues-it-matters-only-who-gets-credit-not-what-gets-done/91011308/